We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.

In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.

You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.

I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?

I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.

Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.

When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.

I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.

You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.

The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.

The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

Airports and train stations are where you get to cry

The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don't

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.

Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)